All you need is Scott Thomas, in Beatle's tale and French drama 'Leaving'; a delightful 'Drewe'

In "Nowhere Boy," a modest and enjoyable account of the young John Lennon (who would have been 70 this week), the camera glances fleetingly at a small "Strawberry Field" sign in front of a Liverpool house. What would we have thought of Sam Taylor-Wood's debut feature if the fruit of the sign had been blueberry, or if the hero's touchingly young band mate had been a kid named Peter instead of Paul? We might still have found her film to be modest and enjoyable, albeit less resonant, a coming-of-age drama about a gifted youngster caught in a no-boy's land between a stern aunt who raises him and a loving mom who's too tormented to mother him.

"Nowhere Boy": a movie that chronicles John Lennon's life.

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John is played by Aaron Johnson, who makes him a strong presence, and a credible one. You can imagine that Lennon's prodigious outpouring of pop poetry—the movie ends before the Quarrymen became the Beatles—was beginning to form in the fertile mind of this likable 15-year-old with a cocky facade and a tender soul. The creative process is almost audible in a silent moment when John turns an adoring gaze on the curvaceous body of his first guitar. (The reliably fine shooter Seamus McGarvey did the cinematography.)

The script, adapted by Matt Greenhalgh from a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, is flagrantly Oedipal; almost every scene between John and his mother is sexually charged. The curse is taken off most of these encounters by Anne-Marie Duff's eloquent work in the mother's role—beautiful as a seductress in spite of herself, affecting as a woman with a wild child's impulses. And "Nowhere Boy," which was directed by a woman, gives another enviable role to the brilliant Kristin Scott Thomas. Her Aunt Mimi isn't beautiful, at least on the outside: she buries her features beneath thick powder, marches around in dowdy clothes and looks old beyond her years. When the time comes for truths to be told, though, Ms. Scott Thomas fires off volleys of passion that transform Mimi from a prim martinet into a powerfully loving influence in John's life.

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Above right, Ms. Scott Thomas and Sergi Lopez in 'Leaving.'
IFC Films

'Leaving'

Kristin Scott Thomas is the best though not the only reason to see "Leaving." Catherine Orsini's French-language drama starts with a departure that isn't what it seems to be. The actress looks exceedingly beautiful as Suzanne, a doctor's wife and devoted mother who once had her own career as a physical therapist. After 15 years of domesticity, she hopes to revive her practice as soon as a builder finishes work on her home office. But she's taken out of her comfortable bourgeois life by the builder instead of the office (his name is Ivan and he's played by the excellent Spanish actor Sergi Lopez.) "It hit me," Suzanne tells her husband in an effort to explain her uncontrollable passion: "I didn't ask for it." Nor did she ask for the trials that ensue.

For a triangular tale with a familiar premise, this compact feature, which was written by the director with Gaëlle Macé, proves to be uncommonly interesting. (And beautifully photographed by Agnès Godard, with long shots that tell more than most movies' close-ups.) Suzanne's folie d'amour slowly changes to a folly of another sort, while her love for the hard-working Ivan comes up against chilling issues of class. Along the way, Ms. Scott Thomas finds, or creates, lovely moments like the one when Suzanne tells Ivan teasingly that she won't leave his bed unless he tells her to, then realizes, to her quiet astonishment, that she truly doesn't want to go.

'Life as We Know It'

Opposite singles who have a strong mutual dislike for each other are unexpectedly thrust together when their best friends die and the couple leaves their daughter, 1, in their friends' guardianship.

In the wonderful world of tell-all trailers, you don't have to see "Life as We Know It" to know what it's about, or how the story is worked out. As the website reveals—nay, proclaims—Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel have a first date from hell, followed by the discovery that the friends who introduced them have died and left a will designating them as the ones to raise their baby daughter. If that sounds ever so slightly contrived, you might be a candidate for the online excerpts. Turning on your computer costs a lot less than two tickets to a multiplex, and you don't have to worry about gum on the floor.

If you insist on investigating the big-screen version, be forewarned that the charming co-stars—she's a gifted comedienne, and he's skillful too—contend against coarse direction as well as the clanking machinery of the plot. The movie will surely find an audience, since it speaks to young people's anxieties about marriage and parenting. But what are two particularly engaging performers doing in a dump of a comedy like this?

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Diane Lane and John Malkovich in 'Secretariat.'
Disney Enterprises

'Secretariat'

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A family film about one of the fastest racehorses in history, "Secretariat" stumbles along beneath the weight of leaden life lessons. They're dispensed at frequent intervals by Diane Lane, who does better than anyone had a right to expect, since she is saddled with dialogue of exceptional dreadfulness. Ms. Lane plays Penny Chenery, the owner of the Triple Crown winner, a Colorado housewife and mother who, in the 1970s, took over a Virginia stable from her ailing father. (John Malkovich dispenses some of his trademarked acting tricks as Lucien Laurin, the horse's French-Canadian trainer.) The lessons are feminist in a narrow sense, though they're meant to be broadly inspirational—never give up, run your race to see how far you can run, etc., etc. As if the script weren't clumsy enough, the movie even mangles a wordless moment when Penny seeks to inspire her hay burner by looking him in the eye. His eyes are dead, while her barely suppressed desperation makes her look like a horse wheedler.

'Tamara Drewe'

A young newspaper writer returns to her hometown in the English countryside, where her childhood home is being prepped for sale.

"Tamara Drewe" makes a strong case for rhinoplasty, and a stronger one for the pleasures of comedy. This bucolic frolic was directed with unflagging élan by Stephen Frears from a script with a layered lineage: Moira Buffini adapted a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds which was, in its turn, a contemporary riff on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd." The heroine of the title returns to the Wessex village of her birth with a cute new nose and newfound confidence to go with it. Once an ugly duckling known to the locals as Beaky, she is now absurdly glamorous and, given the unchained nature of her id, extremely dangerous. (It's hard to visualize an outsize schnoz on Gemma Arterton, the lovely actress who plays her, but flashbacks to Tamara's childhood help.)

The story's literary underpinnings are hilariously represented by the denizens of a seedy writers' retreat situated near Tamara's old house, which she has come back to reclaim after her mother's death. Some denizens are dazzled by her charms, others are undone by them. I found myself rooting for Tamara to reconnect in the deepest way with handsome Andy, her childhood friend—Luke Evans makes him a son of the soil who would have had Hardy's vote—and I was shocked by her home-wrecking exploits with a fatuous scrivener, though her heedlessness is exactly the point. The scintillating cast includes Roger Allam, Bill Camp and Tamsin Greig. Dominic Cooper is a fatuous rock star, and Jessica Barden is a wondrously funny teenager, and slatternly deus ex machina, who adores him. A dog named Boss—the credits say he's played by Albert Clark, so make of that what you will—has the dubious distinction of turning a placid herd of Belted Galloway cows into killers.

'Inside Job'

If Charles Ferguson's polemic documentary were merely depressing, it could take its place alongside the dreariest of downer dramas from Bulgaria or the former East Germany. But "Inside Job" has the added value, as well as the cold comfort, of being furiously interesting and hugely infuriating. It's a scathing examination of the global economic meltdown that began more than two years ago and continues to affect our lives.

Takes a closer look at what brought about the financial meltdown in the movie "Inside Job."

Extremely cold comfort can be taken from the case that serves as an introduction. "There is nobody unaffected in Iceland," we are told. Well before 2008, that small island nation privatized its banks; then economists paid by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce wrote reports that praised the perilously fragile banking system. But no nation is an island these days. Cataclysmic events that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG sent concentric tsunamis around the globe, and the film reserves special fury for its contention that "this crisis was not an accident—it was caused by an out-of-control financial sector." (Mr. Ferguson's co-writers were Chad Beck and Adam Bolt. Matt Damon delivers the narration with seething calm.)

As circumstantial evidence, "Inside Job" puts the toys of that sector's beneficiaries on display—the private jets, the horses, the houses and yachts—and lays out some of the astronomical salaries they've received as rewards for failure, as well as success.

But Mr. Ferguson also provides historical context for his provocations—the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, the steady march of deregulation, the advent of exotic derivatives. Iceland isn't the only place where, the film contends, the financial industry "has corrupted the study of economics itself." Among others interviewed on the subject, Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, is unresponsive and visibly shaken during a withering interrogation about his connections to financial-services firms. And the Obama administration gets as much of a drubbing as any other: "It's a Wall Street government," a former president of the Greenlining Institute says. "It's status quo." After seeing "Inside Job," you don't have to be a tea partier to feel the anger that's sweeping the land.

'It's Kind of a Funny Story'

A clinically depressed teenager gets a new start after he checks himself into an adult psychiatric ward in the movie "It's Kind of a Funny Story."

Think of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" blissed out on Wellbutrin and you've got a slight sense of "It's Kind of a Funny Story." The film itself is fairly slight: I'm not sure what it adds up to. Still, I enjoyed every moment of its beguiling saga of a depressed teen named Craig who checks himself into a Manhattan hospital and ends up in an adult psychiatric ward full of, wouldn't you know it, screwy people.

The directors were Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; they adapted the screenplay from Ned Vizzini's young-adult novel. Craig is played by Keir Gilchrist, from "United States of Tara"; he's got a sweet spirit and a cockeyed Paul Simon smile. Of the patients he meets, the most appealing is Noelle (Emma Roberts), and the most mysterious—and funny, surprising and touching—is Bobby, who's played with sensational verve by Zach Galifianakis. From time to time there's a bit of Mickey and Judy putting on mental illness; these aren't tragic figures, and aren't meant to be. But Craig eventually comes to a useful understanding of where he belongs in the spectrum of human suffering. I'd like to think of this graceful little movie as a fantasy about empathy as therapy.

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